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+Title: Student Dysphoria; Or, Comparing This to a Previous Life's War
+Date: 2020-01-01
+Category: commentary
+Tags: schooling
+Status: draft
+
+There was a brief, beautiful moment from 2014, the first year of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), until mid-2016—a year-and-a-half long moment when I _didn't_ have to fight a [desperate ideological war](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) of survival against Society that's _trying to kill me_.
+
+(Technically, trying to impose [gerrymandered concepts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) that raise the message length of my existence in social reality. Like I said, _trying to kill me_.)
+
+Peacetime was _amazing_. I was so happy—not ecstatic, but happy in the ordinary way of moral patient, someone whose life is valuable simply in the experience of living of it, rather than for its effects on some grand Cause. I [wrote a _chess engine_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/minimax-search-and-the-structure-of-cognition/); I [gave money to _charity_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/); I [drank _pumpkin spice_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/pumpkin-spice/) and played [that tower defense game where](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/10/friday-night-lies/) the bad ponies are the good ponies and the good ponies are the bad ponies.
+
+That carefree selfishness is gone now, subordinated to the war effort. And so soon after the last war, too.
+
+The first shots of the last war came in December 2007. I was a schoolstudent at the University in Santa Cruz. Coming into that quarter, I had been excited to take the famous Introduction to Feminisms course, only to find, as the quarter wore on, that it seemed to be taught in a dialect of English I could not speak.